“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” — H.G. Wells

mycuppa April 2020 Newsletter

With many retail outlets closed and supermarkets letting us down in their failures to manage abnormal demands, we thank you for responding positively to sensibly stocking up on essential supplies.

Unfortunately, as consumers switched to online, freight has become a severe challenge, and it will only get slower and more complex.

Logistics around the country was already at capacity before the coronavirus event, so now we must adjust to the different conditions.

Freight congestion is a fact of life under this new regime, so we ask our customers to be patient and take a moment to think before sending us messages of complaint due to transit delays - please don't assume that it's our fault and we are powerless to remedy transit delays.

During this crisis, freight companies are handling extreme volumes. In response, they must operate with less than 50% of their regular staff levels in parcel depots to comply with physical distancing protocols.

Parcels may sit stationary in some depots until they can be processed, but we will continue pushing hard to get your orders out the door and on the road as fast as possible. So far, we are still exceeding our 99% ship rates despite increased volumes.

Freight companies collect earlier from our facility each afternoon, and these pickup times are shifting to either earlier or later without notice.

Please note that we cannot control the times shipping providers collect our freight during the coronavirus event. We recommend that customers place orders earlier in the day to ensure we get the collection cut-off.

We are also grateful for the many messages of kind thanks as they help keep our spirits high - really appreciated.

By now, most of you are aware of the changes implemented over the last three weeks in how parcel deliveries to your premises occur. All freight companies moved to Contactless delivery, and it's both a sensible and practical measure of safety for everyone.

The changes reduce the requirement for receivers to attend parcel collection outlets or Post Offices.

With safe-drop delivery, a signature is no longer required on a parcel delivery.

You must be aware that the delivery agent may not knock on your door (although they are supposed to), so please don't be surprised or annoyed because this is the abnormal environment everyone must operate within.

Be more vigilant than ever in checking any communications sent to you by AusPost or Sendle - remember, we don't see these messages and tracking notifications are not from us as the shipping provider sits between you and us.

Please watch those tracking notifications, as parcels may mysteriously appear on your doorstep. The package could have been put in a spot that's not immediately visible.

We are doing something different this month, and there will be no Secret Label for April. However, there is something else we hope can help.

With the economy screeching to a sudden slowdown, or in some cases frozen, we must be mindful that constraints will continue over the coming months.

Many people have lost their jobs or stood down, businesses are at risk of failure, and households need to stock up on excess supplies to ride through an unknown period of social isolation, effectively blowing budgets on non-perishables, with some even having enough toilet paper to last a year!

The financial stress is extreme, and we get it. With the Aussie dollar down by more than 17%, the price of coffee surged up in line with other imported products.

The lower Aussie dollar makes imported goods more expensive, but there is a better time to talk about how that plays out, and for the moment, we are absorbing these increases.

Fresh produce has also risen as transporting goods around the country is more expensive. Typical supply and demand models commonly influencing goods pricing are thrown out the window.

In place of April's Secret Label, we have prepared a humble, retro coffee blend to offer you a chance to help save a bit of money—the return of a KLASIK.

It's no rock star, but a decent, honest coffee that represents excellent value - it's also freshly roasted every day and "safe dropped at your door". For a short time only, or until those lots used in Klasik remain available.

the return of a great value Klasik

With no Secret Label this month, it's not because we need more new coffees to put together something unique. 

We took another 8 tons of new stuff last week, but let's face it: the situation with this coronavirus event is delicate and sensitive; hence, it demands a different style of play.

Undoubtedly, the pandemic is causing financial distress for many people. Stocking up on extra household essentials means budget expenses are under pressure, and for some, that only adds to the stress and anxiety of a looming health crisis.

With the Aussie dollar recently falling up to 17% and all coffees traded in USD, it's had an immediate impact upon the rise of coffee prices - close to 20%.

We built a new Klasik blend in April and offered it at a discounted price.

It is a humble, decent, rewarding, solid coffee with punchy cup attributes, and, more importantly, it represents excellent value, freshly roasted daily and safely dropped at your door around Australia.

Klasik's got plenty of oomph, with dark chocolate, delicate citrus acidity, honey, cocoa, nuts and a long, rich caramel finish in the cup.

It is reminiscent of those old-school flavour bombs in the coffee world 20 years ago.

Versatile and smooth with great classic coffee flavours - an iron fist in a velvet glove.

This special offer is unlikely to run for an extended period as we have only a limited amount of the lots used to make the blend. Once it's gone, that's it.

Sorry, no 500g packs and no ground packs - whole bean 1kg packs only.

You can see all our online coffee blends here.

 

How small business ran circles around the epic failures of supermarkets

Australia's dominant supermarkets have been flexing their muscles and growing for 35 years at the expense of local general stores. Still, with all their might and power, they needed to be more knowledgeable in an epic failure to understand and manage the problems of panic buying and hoarding, taking way too long to limit purchase quantities appropriately.

A staggering amount of basic food and personal items have been intermittently unavailable from supermarkets and retailers due to selfish behaviour from a minority of hoarders.

Naturally, this quickly leads consumers to shop online for goods - an environment that's easier to regulate against panic or excessive buying patterns.

At best estimate, it's going to take more than a theoretical couple of weeks to repair the damage of supply chain failures at supermarkets - because, quite simply, the panic will not subside, and even today, it's showing no signs of abating on many necessities.

It took four attempts to enforce the proper level of controls in supermarkets - combining reduced opening times with more sensible purchase limits.

If further lockdown restrictions occur (and we believe this will happen as the peak is not yet upon us), then some grocery shortages may reach a minimum of a month.

Despite assurances to citizens that there is enough food to feed Australia, these claims are only partially accurate as supply chains are breaking and already have broken across many industries.

Our suppliers are experiencing significant difficulties providing continuity, and we carry more risks today than last month.

Of course, there are many theories, conspiracies and stories everyone can share about how and why panic buying happening, but the fact is the combination of events has escalated to levels of crisis that supermarkets and many suppliers are unable to manage in the short-term, despite hollow reassurances from supermarket CEO's and politicians.

For example, a few weeks ago, we placed an order online with Coles to comply with social distancing for delivery to our work premises. What a terrible decision.

We placed our reasonably small Coles Online order before the panic buying spread from toilet paper and hand sanitiser to other pantry items. It was before the shutdown of supermarket online portals due to high demand.

It resulted in utter disaster - Coles, you should be ashamed.

Waiting seven days for a primary delivery was no big deal, and we remained patient, happy and quietly confident that the items we ordered would arrive as they were in stock when we placed the order.

But Coles never attempted to tell us they weren't going to supply everything on our order despite Coles sending us an email an hour before delivery to say our order was on the way. 

We had no warning or notification that the goods we needed on order would never be supplied by Coles - just disgraceful.

After patiently waiting seven days, there were just a few bottles of fruit juice - no food or groceries. If that order were for an elderly or house-bound citizen, they would have starved to death. No communications, no warning, nothing from Coles - even since this debacle, not even an essential follow-up or apology.

It took Coles 7 days for their truck to take nothing off empty supermarket shelves and drive the short 3 kilometres to deliver just a few bottles of juice. 

Not a single thing we could eat! 

What a joke and crap effort from Coles whilst at the same time Coles CEO claimed there was plenty of inventory in distribution centres.

We would never have bothered if we knew Coles Online would treat customers like that. We could have easily picked up more items by attending a store or supporting our local traders, who surprisingly had things most households needed.

So again, it was left to Australia's many small business engines to pivot rapidly in an emergency. At the same time, the Titanic supermarkets continued to mindlessly smash into icebergs using weak excuses such as "uncharted territory".

Plenty of small food supply businesses switched from wholesale only to open for the public to provide much-needed supply capacity.

The story is about ensuring we have sufficient supplies to fill customer orders.

We replenished our carton stocks, but there are still many challenges in that area as incredible demands upon packaged goods have hit our carton supplier hard.

Whilst we usually hold around 28+ tons of raw coffee in our warehouse, that inventory has rapidly diminished over the month at rates close to triple the norm.

We are sitting lower with another 11 tons inbound next week to help plug holes.

Some of our coffee origins are running low as we ripped through vast quantities and will inevitably stock out some rare lots before new seasons arrive in May, June and July.